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Title: Xenofeminism Author: Laboria Cuboniks Language: en Topics: feminism, transfeminism, technology, gender, Laboria Cuboniks, queer, science, universalism Source: Retrieved on February 19th, 2016 from [[http://www.laboriacuboniks.net]]
Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with technological
mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and
complexity. XF constructs a feminism adapted to these realities: a
feminism of unprecedented cunning, scale, and vision; a future in which
the realization of gender justice and feminist emancipation contribute
to a universalist politics assembled from the needs of every human,
cutting across race, ability, economic standing, and geographical
position. No more futureless repetition on the treadmill of capital, no
more submission to the drudgery of labour, productive and reproductive
alike, no more reification of the given masked as critique. Our future
requires depetrification. XF is not a bid for revolution, but a wager on
the long game of history, demanding imagination, dexterity and
persistence.
XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. We are all
alienated -- but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and not
despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the
muck of immediacy. Freedom is not a given -- and it's certainly not
given by anything 'natural'. The construction of freedom involves not
less but more alienation; alienation is the labour of freedom's
construction. Nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or 'given'
-- neither material conditions nor social forms. XF mutates, navigates
and probes every horizon. Anyone who's been deemed 'unnatural' in the
face of reigning biological norms, anyone who's experienced injustices
wrought in the name of natural order, will realize that the
glorification of 'nature' has nothing to offer us -- the queer and trans
among us, the differently-abled, as well as those who have suffered
discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to child-rearing. XF
is vehemently anti naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology
-- the sooner it is exorcised, the better.
Why is there so little explicit, organized effort to repurpose
technologies for progressive gender political ends? XF seeks to
strategically deploy existing technologies to re-engineer the world.
Serious risks are built into these tools; they are prone to imbalance,
abuse, and exploitation of the weak. Rather than pretending to risk
nothing, XF advocates the necessary assembly of techno-political
interfaces responsive to these risks. Technology isn't inherently
progressive. Its uses are fused with culture in a positive feedback loop
that makes linear sequencing, prediction, and absolute caution
impossible. Technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective
theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the
gender non-conforming play an unparalleled role.
The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized. Fed by
the market, its rapid growth is offset by bloat, and elegant innovation
is surrendered to the buyer, whose stagnant world it decorates. Beyond
the noisy clutter of commodified cruft, the ultimate task lies in
engineering technologies to combat unequal access to reproductive and
pharmacological tools, environmental cataclysm, economic instability, as
well as dangerous forms of unpaid/underpaid labour. Gender inequality
still characterizes the fields in which our technologies are conceived,
built, and legislated for, while female workers in electronics (to name
just one industry) perform some of the worst paid, monotonous and
debilitating labour. Such injustice demands structural, machinic and
ideological correction.
Xenofeminism is a rationalism. To claim that reason or rationality is
'by nature' a patriarchal enterprise is to concede defeat. It is true
that the canonical 'history of thought' is dominated by men, and it is
male hands we see throttling existing institutions of science and
technology. But this is precisely why feminism must be a rationalism --
because of this miserable imbalance, and not despite it. There is no
'feminine' rationality, nor is there a 'masculine' one. Science is not
an expression but a suspension of gender. If today it is dominated by
masculine egos, then it is at odds with itself – and this contradiction
can be leveraged. Reason, like information, wants to be free, and
patriarchy cannot give it freedom. Rationalism must itself be a
feminism. XF marks the point where these claims intersect in a two-way
dependency. It names reason as an engine of feminist emancipation, and
declares the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular.
The excess of modesty in feminist agendas of recent decades is not
proportionate to the monstrous complexity of our reality, a reality
crosshatched with fibre optic cables, radio and microwaves, oil and gas
pipelines, aerial and shipping routes, and the unrelenting, simultaneous
execution of millions of communication protocols with every passing
millisecond. Systematic thinking and structural analysis have largely
fallen by the wayside in favour of admirable, but insufficient
struggles, bound to fixed localities and fragmented insurrections.
Whilst capitalism is understood as a complex and ever-expanding
totality, many would-be emancipatory anti-capitalist projects remain
profoundly fearful of transitioning to the universal, resisting
big-picture speculative politics by condemning them as necessarily
oppressive vectors. Such a false guarantee treats universals as
absolute, generating a debilitating disjuncture between the thing we
seek to depose and the strategies we advance to depose it.
Global complexity opens us to urgent cognitive and ethical demands.
These are Promethean responsibilities that cannot pass unaddressed. Much
of twenty-first century feminism -- from the remnants of postmodern
identity politics to large swathes of contemporary ecofeminism --
struggles to adequately address these challenges in a manner capable of
producing substantial and enduring change. Xenofeminism endeavours to
face up to these obligations as collective agents capable of
transitioning between multiple levels of political, material and
conceptual organization.
We are adamantly synthetic, unsatisfied by analysis alone. XF urges
constructive oscillation between description and prescription to
mobilize the recursive potential of contemporary technologies upon
gender, sexuality and disparities of power. Given that there are a range
of gendered challenges specifically relating to life in a digital age --
from sexual harassment via social media, to doxxing, privacy, and the
protection of online images -- the situation requires a feminism at ease
with computation. Today, it is imperative that we develop an ideological
infrastructure that both supports and facilitates feminist interventions
within connective, networked elements of the contemporary world.
Xenofeminism is about more than digital self-defence and freedom from
patriarchal networks. We want to cultivate the exercise of positive
freedom – freedom-to rather than simply freedom-from -- and urge
feminists to equip themselves with the skills to redeploy existing
technologies and invent novel cognitive and material tools in the
service of common ends.
The radical opportunities afforded by developing (and alienating) forms
of technological mediation should no longer be put to use in the
exclusive interests of capital, which, by design, only benefits the few.
There are incessantly proliferating tools to be annexed, and although no
one can claim their comprehensive accessibility, digital tools have
never been more widely available or more sensitive to appropriation than
they are today. This is not an elision of the fact that a large amount
of the world's poor is adversely affected by the expanding technological
industry (from factory workers labouring under abominable conditions to
the Ghanaian villages that have become a repository for the e-waste of
the global powers) but an explicit acknowledgement of these conditions
as a target for elimination. Just as the invention of the stock market
was also the invention of the crash, Xenofeminism knows that
technological innovation must equally anticipate its systemic condition
responsively.
XF rejects illusion and melancholy as political inhibitors. Illusion, as
the blind presumption that the weak can prevail over the strong with no
strategic coordination, leads to unfulfilled promises and unmarshalled
drives. This is a politics that, in wanting so much, ends up building so
little. Without the labour of large-scale, collective social
organisation, declaring one's desire for global change is nothing more
than wishful thinking. On the other hand, melancholy -- so endemic to
the left -- teaches us that emancipation is an extinct species to be
wept over and that blips of negation are the best we can hope for. At
its worst, such an attitude generates nothing but political lassitude,
and at its best, installs an atmosphere of pervasive despair which too
often degenerates into factionalism and petty moralizing. The malady of
melancholia only compounds political inertia, and -- under the guise of
being realistic -- relinquishes all hope of calibrating the world
otherwise. It is against such maladies that XF innoculates.
We take politics that exclusively valorize the local in the guise of
subverting currents of global abstraction, to be insufficient. To secede
from or disavow capitalist machinery will not make it disappear.
Likewise, suggestions to pull the lever on the emergency brake of
embedded velocities, the call to slow down and scale back, is a
possibility available only to the few -- a violent particularity of
exclusivity -- ultimately entailing catastrophe for the many. Refusing
to think beyond the microcommunity, to foster connections between
fractured insurgencies, to consider how emancipatory tactics can be
scaled up for universal implementation, is to remain satisfied with
temporary and defensive gestures. XF is an affirmative creature on the
offensive, fiercely insisting on the possibility of large-scale social
change for all of our alien kin.
A sense of the world's volatility and artificiality seems to have faded
from contemporary queer and feminist politics, in favour of a plural but
static constellation of gender identities, in whose bleak light
equations of the good and the natural are stubbornly restored. While
having (perhaps) admirably expanded thresholds of 'tolerance', too often
we are told to seek solace in unfreedom, staking claims on being 'born'
this way, as if offering an excuse with nature's blessing. All the
while, the heteronormative centre chugs on. XF challenges this
centrifugal referent, knowing full well that sex and gender are
exemplary of the fulcrum between norm and fact, between freedom and
compulsion. To tilt the fulcrum in the direction of nature is a
defensive concession at best, and a retreat from what makes trans and
queer politics more than just a lobby: that it is an arduous assertion
of freedom against an order that seemed immutable. Like every myth of
the given, a stable foundation is fabulated for a real world of chaos,
violence, and doubt. The 'given' is sequestered into the private realm
as a certainty, whilst retreating on fronts of public consequences. When
the possibility of transition became real and known, the tomb under
Nature's shrine cracked, and new histories -- bristling with futures –
escaped the old order of 'sex'. The disciplinary grid of gender is in no
small part an attempt to mend that shattered foundation, and tame the
lives that escaped it. The time has now come to tear down this shrine
entirely, and not bow down before it in a piteous apology for what
little autonomy has been won.
If 'cyberspace' once offered the promise of escaping the strictures of
essentialist identity categories, the climate of contemporary social
media has swung forcefully in the other direction, and has become a
theatre where these prostrations to identity are performed. With these
curatorial practices come puritanical rituals of moral maintenance, and
these stages are too often overrun with the disavowed pleasures of
accusation, shaming, and denunciation. Valuable platforms for
connection, organization, and skill-sharing become clogged with
obstacles to productive debate positioned as if they are debate. These
puritanical politics of shame -- which fetishize oppression as if it
were a blessing, and cloud the waters in moralistic frenzies -- leave us
cold. We want neither clean hands nor beautiful souls, neither virtue
nor terror. We want superior forms of corruption.
What this shows is that the task of engineering platforms for social
emancipation and organization cannot ignore the cultural and semiotic
mutations these platforms afford. What requires reengineering are the
memetic parasites arousing and coordinating behaviours in ways occluded
by their hosts' self image; failing this, memes like 'anonymity',
'ethics', 'social justice' and 'privilege-checking' host social
dynamisms at odds with the often-commendable intentions with which
they're taken up. The task of collective self-mastery requires a
hyperstitional manipulation of desire's puppet-strings, and deployment
of semiotic operators over a terrain of highly networked cultural
systems. The will will always be corrupted by the memes in which it
traffics, but nothing prevents us from instrumentalizing this fact, and
calibrating it in view of the ends it desires.
Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist. 'Gender abolitionism' is not code
for the eradication of what are currently considered 'gendered' traits
from the human population. Under patriarchy, such a project could only
spell disaster – the notion of what is 'gendered' sticks
disproportionately to the feminine. But even if this balance were
redressed, we have no interest in seeing the sexuate diversity of the
world reduced. Let a hundred sexes bloom! 'Gender abolitionism' is
shorthand for the ambition to construct a society where traits currently
assembled under the rubric of gender, no longer furnish a grid for the
asymmetric operation of power. 'Race abolitionism' expands into a
similar formula -- that the struggle must continue until currently
racialized characteristics are no more a basis of discrimination than
than the color of one's eyes. Ultimately, every emancipatory
abolitionism must incline towards the horizon of class abolitionism,
since it is in capitalism where we encounter oppression in its
transparent, denaturalized form: you're not exploited or oppressed
because you are a wage labourer or poor; you are a labourer or poor
because you are exploited.
Xenofeminism understands that the viability of emancipatory abolitionist
projects -- the abolition of class, gender, and race -- hinges on a
profound reworking of the universal. The universal must be grasped as
generic, which is to say, intersectional. Intersectionality is not the
morcellation of collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced
identities, but a political orientation that slices through every
particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing of bodies. This is not a
universal that can be imposed from above, but built from the bottom up
-- or, better, laterally, opening new lines of transit across an uneven
landscape. This non-absolute, generic universality must guard against
the facile tendency of conflation with bloated, unmarked particulars –
namely Eurocentric universalism -- whereby the male is mistaken for the
sexless, the white for raceless, the cis for the real, and so on. Absent
such a universal, the abolition of class will remain a bourgeois
fantasy, the abolition of race will remain a tacit white-supremacism,
and the abolition of gender will remain a thinly veiled misogyny, even
-- especially -- when prosecuted by avowed feminists themselves. (The
absurd and reckless spectacle of so many self-proclaimed 'gender
abolitionists'' campaign against trans women is proof enough of this.)
From the postmoderns, we have learnt to burn the facades of the false
universal and dispel such confusions; from the moderns, we have learnt
to sift new universals from the ashes of the false. Xenofeminism seeks
to construct a coalitional politics, a politics without the infection of
purity. Wielding the universal requires thoughtful qualification and
precise self-reflection so as to become a ready-to-hand tool for
multiple political bodies and something that can be appropriated against
the numerous oppressions that transect with gender and sexuality. The
universal is no blueprint, and rather than dictate its uses in advance,
we propose XF as a platform. The very process of construction is
therefore understood to be a negentropic, iterative, and continual
refashioning. Xenofeminism seeks to be a mutable architecture that, like
open source software, remains available for perpetual modification and
enhancement following the navigational impulse of militant ethical
reasoning. Open, however, does not mean undirected. The most durable
systems in the world owe their stability to the way they train order to
emerge as an 'invisible hand' from apparent spontaneity; or exploit the
inertia of investment and sedimentation. We should not hesitate to learn
from our adversaries or the successes and failures of history. With this
in mind, XF seeks ways to seed an order that is equitable and just,
injecting it into the geometry of freedoms these platforms afford.
Our lot is cast with technoscience, where nothing is so sacred that it
cannot be reengineered and transformed so as to widen our aperture of
freedom, extending to gender and the human. To say that nothing is
sacred, that nothing is transcendent or protected from the will to know,
to tinker and to hack, is to say that nothing is supernatural. 'Nature'
-- understood here, as the unbounded arena of science -- is all there
is. And so, in tearing down melancholy and illusion; the unambitious and
the non-scaleable; the libidinized puritanism of certain online
cultures, and Nature as an un-remakeable given, we find that our
normative anti-naturalism has pushed us towards an unflinching
ontological naturalism. There is nothing, we claim, that cannot be
studied scientifically and manipulated technologically.
This does not mean that the distinction between the ontological and the
normative, between fact and value, is simply cut and dried. The vectors
of normative anti-naturalism and ontological naturalism span many
ambivalent battlefields. The project of untangling what ought to be from
what is, of dissociating freedom from fact, will from knowledge, is,
indeed, an infinite task. There are many lacunae where desire confronts
us with the brutality of fact, where beauty is indissociable from truth.
Poetry, sex, technology and pain are incandescent with this tension we
have traced. But give up on the task of revision, release the reins and
slacken that tension, and these filaments instantly dim.
The potential of early, text-based internet culture for countering
repressive gender regimes, generating solidarity among marginalised
groups, and creating new spaces for experimentation that ignited
cyberfeminism in the nineties has clearly waned in the twenty-first
century. The dominance of the visual in today's online interfaces has
reinstated familiar modes of identity policing, power relations and
gender norms in self-representation. But this does not mean that
cyberfeminist sensibilities belong to the past. Sorting the subversive
possibilities from the oppressive ones latent in today's web requires a
feminism sensitive to the insidious return of old power structures, yet
savvy enough to know how to exploit the potential. Digital technologies
are not separable from the material realities that underwrite them; they
are connected so that each can be used to alter the other towards
different ends. Rather than arguing for the primacy of the virtual over
the material, or the material over the virtual, xenofeminism grasps
points of power and powerlessness in both, to unfold this knowledge as
effective interventions in our jointly composed reality.
Intervention in more obviously material hegemonies is just as crucial as
intervention in digital and cultural ones. Changes to the built
environment harbour some of the most significant possibilities in the
reconfiguration of the horizons of women and queers. As the embodiment
of ideological constellations, the production of space and the decisions
we make for its organization are ultimately articulations about 'us' and
reciprocally, how a 'we' can be articulated. With the potential to
foreclose, restrict, or open up future social conditions, xenofeminists
must become attuned to the language of architecture as a vocabulary for
collective choreo-graphy -- the coordinated writing of space.
From the street to the home, domestic space too must not escape our
tentacles. So profoundly ingrained, domestic space has been deemed
impossible to disembed, where the home as norm has been conflated with
home as fact, as an un-remakeable given. Stultifying 'domestic realism'
has no home on our horizon. Let us set sights on augmented homes of
shared laboratories, of communal media and technical facilities. The
home is ripe for spatial transformation as an integral component in any
process of feminist futurity. But this cannot stop at the garden gates.
We see too well that reinventions of family structure and domestic life
are currently only possible at the cost of either withdrawing from the
economic sphere -- the way of the commune -- or bearing its burdens
manyfold – the way of the single parent. If we want to break the inertia
that has kept the moribund figure of the nuclear family unit in place,
which has stubbornly worked to isolate women from the public sphere, and
men from the lives of their children, while penalizing those who stray
from it, we must overhaul the material infrastructure and break the
economic cycles that lock it in place. The task before us is twofold,
and our vision necessarily stereoscopic: we must engineer an economy
that liberates reproductive labour and family life, while building
models of familiality free from the deadening grind of wage labour.
From the home to the body, the articulation of a proactive politics for
biotechnical intervention and hormones presses. Hormones hack into
gender systems possessing political scope extending beyond the aesthetic
calibration of individual bodies. Thought structurally, the distribution
of hormones -- who or what this distribution prioritizes or pathologizes
-- is of paramount import. The rise of the internet and the hydra of
black market pharmacies it let loose -- together with a publicly
accessible archive of endocrinological knowhow – was instrumental in
wresting control of the hormonal economy away from 'gatekeeping'
institutions seeking to mitigate threats to established distributions of
the sexual. To trade in the rule of bureaucrats for the market is,
however, not a victory in itself. These tides need to rise higher. We
ask whether the idiom of 'gender hacking' is extensible into a
long-range strategy, a strategy for wetware akin to what hacker culture
has already done for software –- constructing an entire universe of free
and open source platforms that is the closest thing to a practicable
communism many of us have ever seen. Without the foolhardy endangerment
of lives, can we stitch together the embryonic promises held before us
by pharmaceutical 3D printing ('Reactionware'), grassroots telemedical
abortion clinics, gender hacktivist and DIY-HRT forums, and so on, to
assemble a platform for free and open source medicine?
From the global to the local, from the cloud to our bodies, xenofeminism
avows the responsibility in constructing new institutions of
technomaterialist hegemonic proportions. Like engineers who must
conceive of a total structure as well as the molecular parts from which
it is constructed, XF emphasises the importance of the mesopolitical
sphere against the limited effectiveness of local gestures, creation of
autonomous zones, and sheer horizontalism, just as it stands against
transcendent, or top-down impositions of values and norms. The
mesopolitical arena of xenofeminism's universalist ambitions comprehends
itself as a mobile and intricate network of transits between these
polarities. As pragmatists, we invite contamination as a mutational
driver between such frontiers.
XF asserts that adapting our behaviour for an era of Promethean
complexity is a labour requiring patience, but a ferocious patience at
odds with 'waiting'. Calibrating a political hegemony or insurgent
memeplex not only implies the creation of material infra-structures to
make the values it articulates explicit, but places demands on us as
subjects. How are we to become hosts of this new world? How do we build
a better semiotic parasite -- one that arouses the desires we want to
desire, that orchestrates not an autophagic orgy of indignity or rage,
but an emancipatory and egalitarian community buttressed by new forms of
unselfish solidarity and collective self-mastery?
Is xenofeminism a programme? Not if this means anything so crude as a
recipe, or a single-purpose tool by which a determinate problem is
solved. We prefer to think like the schemer or lisper, who seeks to
construct a new language in which the problem at hand is immersed, so
that solutions for it, and for any number of related problems, might
unfurl with ease. Xenofeminism is a platform, an incipient ambition to
construct a new language for sexual politics -- a language that seizes
its own methods as materials to be reworked, and incrementally
bootstraps itself into existence. We understand that the problems we
face are systemic and interlocking, and that any chance of global
success depends on infecting myriad skills and contexts with the logic
of XF. Ours is a transformation of seeping, directed subsumption rather
than rapid overthrow; it is a transformation of deliberate construction,
seeking to submerge the white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy in a sea
of procedures that soften its shell and dismantle its defenses, so as to
build a new world from the scraps.
Xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a
triumphant X on a mobile map. This X does not mark a destination. It is
the insertion of a topological-keyframe for the formation of a new
logic. In affirming a future untethered to the repetition of the
present, we militate for ampliative capacities, for spaces of freedom
with a richer geometry than the aisle, the assembly line, and the feed.
We need new affordances of perception and action unblinkered by
naturalised identities. In the name of feminism, 'Nature' shall no
longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for any political
justification whatsoever!
If nature is unjust, change nature!